Well, having a platform agnostic runtime, you could throw arbitrary code at, was potentially a great deal. It was one of the founding concepts for ARPANET, which never took off, since nobody wanted to run foreign code from the network on their machines. For a platform agnostic runtime, OO may have seemed to fit well, by encapsulating data, handlers and logic into interacting objects. (This is close to the original use case for OO as described by Alan Kay.)

Fun fact: Java was also renamed from formerly Oak.